The Fifth Estate to open the Toronto International Film Festival

24/07/2013

The Fifth Estate, Bill Condon's Wikileaks feature is to open this year's Toronto International Film Festival (5 – 15 September 2013). Starring a.o. Benedict Cumberbatch (as Julian Assange) and Daniel Brühl (as Daniel Domscheit-Berg), the film was partly shot in Flanders and got supported through the Belgian Tax Shelter system. Flemish co-producer of this Afterworks/FBO co-production is Hilde De Laere (The Loft). The Fifth Estate will be released in Belgium on 21 November by Entertainment One Benelux.

Following Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Brühl), an early supporter and eventual colleague of Julian Assange (Cumberbatch), The Fifth Estate traces the heady, early days of WikiLeaks, culminating in the release of a series of controversial and history changing information leaks. The website’s overnight success brought instant fame to its principal architects and transformed the flow of information to news media and the world at large.

The film about the controversial website stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange and Daniel Brühl as Daniel Domscheit-Berg, as well as Laura Linney, Anthony Mackie, David Thewlis, Peter Capaldi, Dan Stevens, Alicia Vikander and the Dutch actress Carice van Houten.

Bill Condon (Kinsey, Dreamgirls, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn) directed The Fifth Estate from a screenplay by Josh Singer (Fringe, The West Wing), based on ‘Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website’ by Daniel Domscheit-Berg and ‘WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy’ by David Leigh and Luke Harding. The producers are Steve Golin and Michael Sugar, with Participant’s Jeff Skoll and Jonathan King as executive producers. The Fifth Estate is a coproduction between Afterworks and FBO, with Hilde De Laere (The Memory of a Killer, The Loft) co-producing for FBO. The film was partly shot in Flanders and got supported through the Belgian Tax Shelter system.

The Fifth Estate will be released in Belgium on 21 November by Entertainment One Benelux.